I bought a gmail invite from a message board. If this sequence of words makes sense to you, you’re old too.
I got an invite to Gmail when I was in university. Sadly I was at inbox zero for quite some time so I don’t have the Welcome to Gmail email anymore. It’s more than likely my oldest active account. I do have a Neowin account that still works from 2002 but I don’t frequent anymore. Macrumors is my most active old forum account, that’s from 2005. I had an ancient AIM and ICQ account but there’s no way I could remember the account details.
Ditto for the AIM and ICQ.
I think I read recently that ICQ was shutting down.
TIL G-Mail was invite only back then. I am too GenZ to undersand this shit.
Mine was from a chain of random people posting their invite links on Slashdot. It feels like ancient history now.
My Hotmail account, which I’ve had since high school. Oldest email in there is from 2002, but I think I opened it up in 2000.
All my friends and I used to have Yahoo! email addresses. But for some reason around 2010 almost everyone’s accounts seemed to be getting compromised and sending weird messages around to their contacts… and now I don’t know anyone with a Yahoo!
I never figured out what was going on and why Yahoo in particular seemed so affected by it.
Probably my 2004 Gmail account, but that’s pushing the definition of “still use somewhat frequently”. I do still have my email forwarded to my current address, but most senders have been updated with my current address.
I lost control of my Hotmail, AIM, ICQ accounts years ago.
Didn’t ICQ recently shut the service down? Thought I saw a headline along those lines recently.
Did they? I only log in like every six months or so. :(
Edit: yep. June 24, 2024. RIP 8833052
Usenet account from 1987. And no, I’m not going to post what it is.
Usenet was the golden age of Reddit for its time. Before the binary newsgroups drowned everything out and web 1.0 captured everyone’s attention.
In a way, it was a lot like Lemmy. Federated servers all inter-exchanged posts to a giant, global message board of newsgroups (roughly analogous to a subreddit or Lemmy community). Anyone could create a newsgroup and there were a lot of them.
When it was good, it fostered the same kind of genuine conversation that Reddit and Lemmy do when they’re at their best. It was full of memes, too, although that word didn’t exist then.
My original Gmail account. I’ve had it since Gmail was in closed beta.
My Steam account is older though. Fucking thing is old enough to drink now (2003; from when I first had to use it for Counter-Strike when they took down the WON servers).
Any other 21 year old Steam accounts wanna play some Ragdoll Kung-Fu?
Damn, I have almost the exact same answer. Switched to Steam once WON got taken down (held out as long as I could), and had a friend send me a Gmail invite a few months later.
Only differences are that I mostly used mine for TFC, and my account won’t technically hit drinking age until early next month.
I kinda wish I could say I had like a bottle of liquor I’ve been saving for the occasion, but the idea of a “21-year-old Steam account” genuinely never occurred to me until one day I woke up and realized it was about to turn 18. Made me realize how fast shit moves, and this is just driving the point home…
